Day 4

Day 4

Fay, Fuyang Shen

 

 

Day 4 was really an eventful day. We interviewed two professors in the morning. Their responses were extremely insightful. In the afternoon, we conducted a FGD with four Chiang Mai University students. At night, we had a group discussion to consolidate everything we had gathered in the day.

 

10:00 am. Before I had the time to get myself ready, I was already at the interview with Prof. Ariya and Prof Matcha. Prof. Matcha was from a less privileged background but she nevertheless empowered herself to be a strong and confident woman through her hard work. As such, she was able to offer views both from the upper and middle classes as well as those who come from less fortunate families. She painted Thai cultural context for us and let us understand that many traditional beliefs embedded in Thai culture disfavour women inevitably. More often than not, many discriminating practices were considered good rules to abide by instead of an infringement on women’s equal rights in society. Prof. Ariya also shared with us how Thai society imposes more restrictions on women than men and how women are fighting for their rights but a lot of things are holding them back

 

 

I realized Prof. Ariya and Prof. Matcha both reported a rather unsatisfying level of female empowerment in Thailand, while the youths we interviewed the day before provided completely different answers. The professors explained further that sometimes people talk and act very differently. In addition, if they are from privileged backgrounds and received adequate empowerment, they would not be bothered about those who are still suffering.

 

After listening to them, I felt so enlightened. I did not expect that the issue of female empowerment can be so multi-faceted and interlinked with so many other concepts. I was so glad that I had the opportunity to talk to these two knowledgeable professors who truly had the heart and spirit to better the situation of Thai women by putting in their own effort in NGOs as well as in school teachings.

 

The FGD with four CMU students in the afternoon was very enlightening as well. It was a lesson learnt from the first FGD that too many participants would be difficult to handle, so we decided to go with just four FGD participants. We clearly saw that the four girls we interviewed were very confident. According to Fye, all of them were in different ways influenced by western culture and beliefs.  For example, Paeng has a British stepfather, Paerl is in an English programme. Maybe that was the key reason why all of them reported that they felt empowered.

 

I then dug deeper into the different socio-economic backgrounds of youths across the country and asked about the situation of Thai young women from poorer family background who do not necessarily have the resources to empower themselves. They responded that young women from rural area do think very differently from those living in cities. This is primarily due to the lack of education, thus inadequate English proficiency, which impedes them greatly from consuming western cultural products and therefore have more avant-garde viewpoints and open-mindedness. As a result, the empowerment gap between young women in cities and rural area is very huge.

 

After intense interviews and FGDs, we went to CMU Lake, where we embraced pure serenity and grace.

 

At night, we collated our survey results and realized some participants did not fill up the second page of our survey. We reached a consensus that we should tell all the participants beforehand that the survey form is double-sided.